Sunday, January 13, 2013

But the Met Office was not going to abandon easily its core belief that the main force shaping climate was that rise in CO2. As its chief scientist, Julia Slingo, admitted to MPs in 2010, its short-term forecasts are based on the same “numerical models” as “we use for our climate prediction work”, and these have been predicting “hotter, drier summers” and “warmer winters” for decades ahead. Hence all those fiascos which have made the Met Office a laughing stock, from the “barbecue summer” that never was in 2008, to the “warmer than average winter” of 2010 which brought us our coldest-ever December, to its prediction last spring that April, May and June 2012 would probably be “drier than average”, just before we enjoyed the wettest April and summer on record.

Such a catastrophic blunder is scarcely mitigated by the Met Office’s sneaky attempt to hide that absurd 2011 graph. One day it will be recognised how the Met Office’s betrayal of proper science played a key part in creating the most expensive scare story the world has ever known, the colossal bill for which we will all be paying for decades to come.